IV
"We've found a treasure," Mark Easter enthusiastically told Sir Julian. "Miss Marchrose is the best worker I've ever struck. And she'll do anything—doesn't mind what she turns her hand to. You'll have to see her, Sir Julian—dashed good-looking girl into the bargain."
Sir Julian was not insensible to the attraction of the last qualification, but he felt no security of endorsing Mark Easter's ready acclamation of a pretty face. His own taste was eclectic and the witless pink and white, the unsubtle contours that constitute the ideal feminine to the average Englishman, held no appeal for him.
He soon saw Miss Marchrose at the College, in the room adjoining Fuller's office that had been designed for the personal use of the Lady Superintendent.
She was talking to Mark Easter, standing beside him in the window, and the afternoon sun struck full upon her, revealing every little finely-drawn line of fatigue round her eyes and mouth.
Sir Julian's first sensation was of involuntary, surprised satisfaction at the slim, tall distinction of her whole bearing; the next, one of surprise at Mark Easter's verdict on her looks.
"Ten years ago, perhaps," he reflected. "Now she probably varies according to her state of health. But she'll never be called pretty."
Nevertheless, it seemed to him easy enough to trace a softer, rounder contour to the oval face, and to erase in imagination the shadows underlying black brows and hazel eyes, and the tiny, indelible marks that some past bitterness had left at either corner of the closely-curved mouth that was Miss Marchrose's most undeniably beautiful feature.
Her hair was brown, a soft dead-leaf colour that held no gleams of light and framed her square forehead loosely. Julian, looking at her, received the impression that her face held possibilities full of colour and animation, and yet was more often only faintly coloured, and shadowed with weariness.
"Charming at eighteen—and probably not admired, except by an occasional connoisseur—and now absolutely dependent for looks on the state of her vitality," he summarised her to himself.
But he ceased to entertain any doubts as to the vitality of Miss Marchrose when he heard her speak.
At the first sound of her voice he recognised that therein lay the charm which had made Mark Easter declare her to be good-looking. The soft beauty of a woman's speaking voice such as that of Miss Marchrose might well prove responsible for greater delusions.
The contrast between the extraordinarily musical inflexions of her tones and their rather curt, businesslike utterances almost amused Julian.
He remembered Fuller's complacent recommendation, "Hard as nails, I should think," and surmised that Miss Marchrose had addressed him with the same abrupt, impersonal manner.
Unlike the majority of women, she seldom smiled. When she did so—and presently Julian noticed that Mark Easter could elicit that quick, soft change of expression more often than anyone else—it altered the character of her face very much, and made her look much younger, and rather appealing.
Her powers of organisation were admirable and, as Mark had said, she was ready to concentrate her whole energies upon her work, indifferent, apparently, to the after-office hours which constituted the whole reality of life for those who only lived through the day's business in order to attain their freedom at the end of it.
"I hope you have found comfortable accommodation in Culmouth," Sir Julian said to her.
"Yes, thank you."
Miss Marchrose appeared so little expectant of any further interest in her welfare that Julian almost wondered whether her definition of officiousness might not prove to coincide with his own.
A month after her arrival, however, Mark Easter told the Rossiters that Miss Marchrose was lodging at a farm outside Culmouth, nearly half an hour's walk from the College.
"It wouldn't be far for her to come over here, if you thought of asking her, Lady Rossiter," said Mark. "I'm afraid she must be rather lonely, for she knows no one down here."
"I wonder why she came here," Edna remarked.
"For love of the country, I think," Mark answered, with sufficient assurance in the assertion to make Julian wonder if he had received a confidence.
"I want to know this Miss Marchrose," said Lady Rossiter with decision. "I think I must go to the College to-morrow—I have been quite a long time without seeing any of my friends there. Dear Mr. Fuller! I love Mr. Fuller—he and I have such long talks over the welfare of the staff."
"I shall be in there all day to-morrow. Won't you look in and let Miss Marchrose give you a cup of tea?" said Mark.
"Of course I will. They love dispensing a little hospitality, don't they, and I'm alwaysmostceremonious about returning their calls here. Not that Miss Marchrose has come over yet with the others."
Mark looked a little perplexed, and Julian, unexpectedly even to himself, said rather curtly:
"You won't be able to ask her to make one of your Sunday Band of Hope expeditions, Edna."
"No?" said his wife, still smiling. "I know there are wheels within wheels, and one reason, I think, why they trust me is that I respect all the little prejudices and etiquettes that mean so much to them. Give Miss Marchrose due warning, Mark, will you, that I shall call at tea-time to-morrow and see if she is not too busy to let me have some tea. I want to get into touch with all of them, you know."
Julian, in rather grim anticipation of the process as regarded Miss Marchrose, announced his intention next day of accompanying his wife to the College.
"My dear, I am not often honoured, but shall we not rather overwhelm the young woman?"
"I don't think she is easily overwhelmed."
Edna laughed musically—that is to say, Sir Julian felt convinced that she herself so designated the low, controlled sound of amusement that she so seldom enough judged ità proposto emit.
But her voice was very serious the next instant, and had even dropped a semitone, as she made enquiry:
"Julian, can you tell me yet whether she is really connected with poor Clarence's tragedy?"
"No, certainly not—I haven't tried to find out."
"I wonder why, when you knew that the whole question touched me very nearly. Nothing has much sacredness to you, Julian, has it?"
"I see nothing sacred in the amorous extravagances of your cousin Clarence, certainly."
"And you care very little whether the woman who is charged with the welfare of all those young men and women—sharers, after all, of our common humanity—can give them true, pure-hearted love and service and fellowship," mused Edna. "And yet to me those ideals which you dismiss so lightly seem the most important things in all the world. You see, Julian, love seems to me to matter more than anything in the whole world."
"In the case of a Lady Superintendent for the College, a knowledge of shorthand is more important," said Julian indifferently.
He had long since fallen into the habit of uttering the cheap jeers that had once inadequately served to protect him from blatant references that now had almost lost effect.
"God forbid that I should condemn anyone—who am I, to judge of another?—but I can't pretend to you, Julian, that it won't become a question of conscience with me, if I find that a position of such responsibility towards my boys and girls is held by a woman who could throw a man over heartlessly, break her given pledge, just at the moment when he was more in need of her than ever before."
"If she was heartless, he may have been well rid of her, as I said before."
"At what a cost! His first faith shattered, poor boy. You remember what that nurse told me about him."
"I remember perfectly, but I should think both Clarence Isbister and the girl he married would very much rather have it forgotten."
"I don't forget easily, Julian."
"Then in kindness to Clarence, I should advise you to keep your recollections to yourself. I doubt if he would thank you or anyone else for reminding the world that he ever saw fit to beat a tattoo with his head on the walls of his nursing-home for the sake of a young woman whom he afterwards forgot all about."
"We can never tell that. Certain wounds do not heal, although they may be hidden from sight."
"Then I'm sorry for Mrs. Clarence."
"I wonder if Miss Marchrose knows that he has married," said Edna, rather viciously.
"I wish you would not take it for granted that this is the same woman," said Julian irritably.
Edna laid two fingers upon his sleeve in a manner designed to emphasise her words.
"I shall take nothing for granted. But you see, Julian, I can't take life quite as you do—quite as callously, as cynically. There is a big responsibility for those of us who see a little—ah, such a very little way it is—further into the heart of things. We can only hope, and give, and spend ourselves—and judge no man."
Julian, who disliked being touched, moved his arm out of reach, and replied to these humanitarian sentiments unsympathetically.
"Your remarks have not the slightest bearing upon the case, Edna."
He thought to himself bitterly, not for the first time, that a stronger man would reject the weapons of obvious, meaningless satire, but nervous irritability again and again drove him to seek an outlet in words that he despised.
In silence, he entered the College with Edna, and let her proceed to the Supervisor's room, aware that he had purposely timed their arrival for an hour when Fairfax Fuller would be engaged in one of the classrooms. Few things discomposed Mr. Fuller more than a feminine intrusion which could not be accounted for by a question of business.
"He will be disappointed," seriously said Edna, turning away from the empty room. "But we shall have other talks. I don't despair yet of getting Fuller to Culmhayes, for all his misogyny." It was a principle with Lady Rossiter, her husband knew, never to allow their differences to degenerate into an offended silence when they were alone.
He sometimes thought that he could have borne it all better had she been a woman to make scenes, and to oppose him with tears or temper, instead of with that considered, brightly-unconscious, eternal loving-kindness.
They found Miss Marchrose in her own room, at work on the typewriter. She wore a long blue pinafore, and Julian noticed with an odd satisfaction that this was one of the days when her variable face showed colour and unmistakable beauty.
"Good afternoon," said Julian. "I hope we are not too early. My wife—Miss Marchrose."
Lady Rossiter, shaking hands, revealed her rather large white teeth in a smile, but Miss Marchrose, after her fashion, remained calmly serious.
"Won't you sit down?"
Lady Rossiter glanced slowly round the room.
It was a large light office, the window thrown open and looking on to the square paved court at the back of the house; the furniture scanty and of the most utilitarian description.
Miss Marchrose's writing-table was orderly, although papers were stacked upon it in wicker trays. A telephone with a glass mouthpiece stood at one corner and an electric reading-lamp at the other.
The typewriter had a very small table to itself, and a high chair with a small cushion placed in front of it. Except for three or four chairs and a strip of carpet, there was no other furniture in the room.
"I've not seen this room furnished before," Edna Rossiter observed. "You've hardly had time for the finishing touches yet, though, have you?"
Her tone was that of assertion, not of enquiry, but Miss Marchrose replied as though to a question.
"I'm afraid there isn't anything more to come. Mr. Fuller has kindly let me have everything I want."
"Even to a glass mouthpiece for the telephone?" enquired Edna smoothly.
A similar adornment distinguished her own telephone in the boudoir at Culmhayes, and Julian knew that his wife frequently drew attention to it by apologies for her own fastidiousness.
"That was brought by Mr. Easter. I used to dislike the old one so much, and he found it out, and very kindly gave me that."
"I shall talk to Mr. Easter about infringing my patent," laughed Edna. She turned to her husband.
"Mark must have seen the glass one in my boudoir, of course."
Julian was perfectly aware of the instinct which had prompted his wife to make use, in addressing herself to him, of Mark Easter's first name.
He smiled rather grimly.
"I think you must have some flowers in here," Edna said to Miss Marchrose. "It does make all the difference, doesn't it, when one is chained to a desk all day?"
"But I'm not chained to a desk," said Miss Marchrose tranquilly. "I take two or three classes, and I'm very often in Mr. Fuller's room. Besides, I don't like flowers in an office; do you?"
"Ah, well," said Edna, in a voice the measured graciousness of which contrasted with the Superintendent's matter-of-fact utterance, "flowers mean rather a lot to me. I'm not happy unless I have a great many all round me.... But I know many people simply look on flowers as flowers, of course. Tell me, do you care for out-of-doors?"
Miss Marchrose looked unintelligent.
"Because I have some little nature-classes, as we call them, for looking into the heart of our West Country rather more closely. One week I take my little band down to the sea, another time up to the woods, sometimes just to study the wonderful colour in a Devonshire lane. I can't help thinking you might find a great deal to admire round Duckpool Farm. Isn't that where you're staying?"
"Yes. I hope you're going to let me give you some tea, Lady Rossiter."
"Presently, but you mustn't let us put you out. Don't alter anything—I love taking things just as I find them.... But tell me why you went to the farm; I thought it rather wonderful of you to strike out such a new line, instead of going to rooms in Church Street or St. Mary-Welcome's, as they all do."
"There are no rooms vacant in Church Street, I believe," said Miss Marchrose, very curtly indeed.
Julian felt convinced that she wished the implication made that had rooms been available she would have selected them, and equally certain that the implication would have been untrue.
"Is Easter here to-day?" he enquired abruptly.
"Yes; I'll let him know you've come. He generally has tea in here, and so does Mr. Fuller."
She went to the telephone.
"You mustn't let us interrupt your work if there's anything you want to finish before tea," Edna told her. "I know what it means to all of you to get through by six o'clock sharp, especially in these late summer evenings when it's already getting dark early. It must be too cruel to be robbed of even a few moments of fresh air and liberty."
Julian remembered Mark's eulogies.
"What time do you leave the College, I wonder?" he asked her, smiling slightly.
"It depends on the work. There's been a good deal of correspondence lately and I've stayed late to finish it up. If I may, there is just something I want to finish here."
She laid her hand on the typewriter.
"Please do."
Without further apology, Miss Marchrose sat down to her machine and completed the sheet upon which she had been engaged. As she drew it off the roller, Mark Easter came in.
She looked up with a sort of pleasure in her glance, and handed him a thin pile of foolscap sheets.
"Five copies," she said.
Mark glanced at the papers.
"I'm so grateful!" he exclaimed. "That's exactly what I wanted. Do you know what that is, Sir Julian?"
"What?"
"Estate business," laughed Mark. "Miss Marchrose is good enough to help me through with some of it, as sheonlyworks ten hours a day here."
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for letting her do it."
"Well," said Miss Marchrose gaily, "he boils my kettle for me."
Mark had placed the big kettle on the gas-ring and cleared the table of the heavy typewriter.
He was in his usual excellent spirits, and made indifferent jokes at which Miss Marchrose laughed with an absence of constraint such as Julian had not seen in her before. It was evident that Mark's gift for making friends had not failed him, any more than his magical capacity for diffusing contentment throughout his surroundings.
Contentment, however, stopped short at Lady Rossiter, as it was always apt to do when the focus of general attention was diverted to an object which she considered unworthy.
"Isn't Mr. Fuller coming in to tea?" She quietly interrupted Mark's exchange of chaffing allusions with Miss Marchrose.
"He generally comes. I'll go and dig him out," Mark volunteered.
"Your presence has frightened him away, Edna," said her husband, not without malice. "Fuller is a shy bird."
Edna smiled serenely.
"Poor Mr. Fuller, he and I are great friends."
It might be doubted whether Lady Rossiter found cause for thankfulness in the presence of her great friend when he eventually joined the tea-party, his face black with scowls at the interruption to his work and suffused with shyness at her complacent greeting.
Miss Marchrose poured out tea and talked to Julian, who sat next her, and Mark, to whom self-consciousness was unknown, handed plates of bread-and-butter and cut up a small plum-cake and endeavoured to win smiles from the recalcitrant Fuller. Edna, her voice modulated to careful sweetness, manufactured kindly conversation.
But Mr. Fuller, his elbows very much squared and his bullet head thrust well forward, devoted his energies to the rapid demolition of his meal, and replied monosyllabically to Mark's kindly derision and Lady Rossiter's benevolences alike. His shyness, however, appeared to place him under a mysterious compulsion to recite aloud, in an inward voice, any scrap of printed matter upon which his eye chanced to fall, regardless of relevance. This necessity, though common enough in any assembly of not too congenial strangers, did not add to continuity of discourse.
As thus, when Lady Rossiter moved a pot of plum jam towards him, saying that she was so sorry that the injunction to makenodifference had not been attended to, Mr. Fuller was constrained to reply in a very severe way, No; he never ate jam—Three gold medals at the Paris and Vienna Exhibitions—but it was there every day, he believed.
"It is there, becauseIlike it," said Miss Marchrose. "They never had anything but bread-and-butter till I came."
Edna's ever-ready eyebrows went up, but she still addressed herself exclusively to Fairfax Fuller.
"Plum jam is quite my favourite. I never really care for the expensive varieties, or think them abitbetter than the others."
"Inspection invited at the manufactories." Fuller pursued his way, almost turning the jam-pot upside down in an apparently agonised search for further literature.
"Jam on bread-and-butter is quite a luxury. Julian and I never get it at home," Lady Rossiter persevered.
"London, Edinburgh,andat Sharplington in Essex," said Fuller, without looking at her.
"Have you ever been over one of those big factories? It would be rather interesting," Mark said, in a charitable endeavour to introduce some element of continuity into the conversation. Lady Rossiter at once seconded the attempt.
"I've always so wished to have an opportunity of that sort. I should like to know just how the poor factory hands live, and what the conditions of work really are in those great places."
"I don't suppose that Sharplington in Essex is on the same scale as London or Edinburgh," Mark suggested.
At which interesting initial stage of an interchange of views, Mr. Fuller suddenly disconcerted everybody by looking straight across the table at the almanack which hung upon the wall, and declaring with a sort of suppressed violence:
"Five thousand souls gained last year alone—The Church Mission Society."
Edna's pale skin absolutely flushed and she set her lips. Mark hastily bent down to pick up an imaginary handkerchief, and Miss Marchrose laughed.
"That's settled it," thought Julian. "Edna will never forgive her that laugh."
He saw no reason to reverse the judgment while his wife took her cool, kindly farewell of the Lady Superintendent.
"You must come out to Culmhayes one day. Of course, I know Saturday afternoons and Sundays are your only free times, so I never issue workday invitations. But I'm always so glad to see any of you, and you can just rest and do anything you please, and not feel obliged to make conversation."
Julian watched the recipient of these attentions rather curiously.
She withdrew her hand from Lady Rossiter's kind, enveloping clasp and put it into the pocket of her pinafore very deliberately.
"On Saturdays I'm going to the estate office with you, I hope. Didn't we arrange that?" she asked Mark Easter.
"If you have nothing better to do, I should be most grateful. Everything is in confusion there, since my clerk had to leave on account of sudden illness."
"I shall like it very much," said Miss Marchrose, with a very charming smile, and still addressing herself exclusively to Mark. "And I've nothing better to do at all, thank you."
Julian, while inwardly applauding her, wondered whether she had herself been entirely aware of the full efficiency of the oblique retaliation.
On the whole, he thought that she had.